When It Comes to Family Values, We Brag a Lot

Oklahomans are fond of “family values.” We feel we place family relationships at a much higher priority than heathen movie stars in California or liberal East-Coast crazies. Sometimes, I wonder just how much we value families–our talk rings more than a little hollow.

I have recently heard from some distraught single moms. These ladies are making heroic efforts to care for kids and keep body and soul together. Sometimes they feel like they may lose the battle in an instant because they are so close to the edge. They worry about poor decisions their latch-key kids might make while Mom is still at work.

It is so odd that in the age of the Internet, we can’t offer more jobs that allow telecommuting.Isn’t it just a little bit puzzling that many U.S. companies have “telecommuting” employees in Mumbai or Bangalore, but struggling single moms, even in the family-values-valuing Bible Belt cannot have any such opportunity.

(If the Econ-O-Nomaly staff is mistaken and there is a plethora of telecommuting choices here in Oklahoma, our readers will surely bring this to our attention.)

Book Review–To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise

To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise
by Bethany Moreton
Harvard University Press, 372 pages
0674033221

At some point during my childhood, my mother began shopping at a new grocery store in our western Oklahoma town. She told my sister and me not to tell our grandfather that she was shopping there. You see, the new grocery store was a dreaded CHAIN STORE! The owners of the store did not live in our town, and they owned TWO other grocery stores—one of them in Kansas! Many Oklahomans of my grandfather’s generation did not like chain stores! My sister and I pledged our secrecy, and my grandfather suffered no ills (at least not because of my mother’s grocery shopping).

What a difference forty years makes! Now, no self-respecting Oklahoman would do anything other than shop at chain stores (indeed there is hardly anywhere else to acquire necessities). We have one special favorite chain store—Wal-Mart! How did things change so much?

Yale graduate, and University of Georgia professor, Bethany Moreton, attempts to answer this question and does so masterfully.

Her analysis revolves around the culture of the Ozarks, where Wal-Mart began. Her penetrating discussion of the company, the folkways of the Ozarks, the religious faith of the customers and employees, and broad political and economic factors give the reader a sweeping panorama of the past fifty years. “Wal-Mart country” has expanded geographically, indeed to global proportions, taking Scots-Irish folkways and evangelical Christianity with it.

Though most of us in Oklahoma don’t identify immediately with the Ozark culture, there are many similarities between that tradition and our rural, agricultural, oil patch heritage. Indeed, many elements of Ozark culture are common throughout the rural South. These various social norms are part and parcel of Moreton’s writing. Rather than taking a simplistic view that interprets Wal-Mart solely as the product of the Ozarks, Moreton paints a complex picture of interaction with and among various cultural threads. Wal-Mart is influenced by the prevailing culture of Sam Walton’s Bentonville, but in turn, Wal-Mart country has been influenced and unquestionably shaped by the behemoth retailer.

Moreton does not write with a bias for or against Wal-Mart. This is an evenhanded treatment seeking to simply take in the various aspects of an international phenomenon. The book is extensively documented with over 100 pages of footnotes and index. This makes it a little shorter than most non-fiction books. It seems a few ideas could have been better developed, and possibly were summed up a little too quickly in the interest of brevity. Nonetheless, this is a great first book from a young Ph.D. We can expect great things from this lady. Read the book.

Of Blue Berries and Big Boxes

High on  our list of favorites here in Oklahoma are Veggie Tales cartoons and big box discount retailers. At first blush, there is no obvious connection between these two, but the book, To Serve God and Wal-Mart:  The Making of Christian Free Enterprise by Bethany Moreton, made me remember Madame Blueberry.

Let’s recall this all-time great Veggie Tales episode. This dramatic work opens with Madame Blueberry feeling very blue. She spends her days envying her neighbors, who have more stuff. Though she has a lovely tree house, she is very blue. An adventure ensues when three guys who resemble skinny green onions show up at her door representing a newly opened big box retailer, Stuff Mart. She immediately rushes to Stuff Mart where she buys all sorts of stuff. When she arrives home with her stuff, she discovers that her house can’t really hold it all, and that’s a problem when you live in a tree. It’s not a pretty picture. In the end, she learns that happiness does not come from a store, and sometimes, we would do well just to be thankful for what we have.

It’s a little odd, though, that the only person who learns a lesson here is Madame Blueberry. The skinny green onion guys are off the hook. No problem that they exploited her weakness (envy) to sell her stuff she did not need and could not even store in her small but charming tree house. No mention of easy credit made available to vegetables with insufficient incomes. No mention of overseas children working at slave wages to manufacture this unnecessary merchandise, the poor quality of the merchandise that will soon find its way to the landfill, or the wasted resources devoted to advertising all this. No, the only problem here is Madame Blueberry who should have known better than to buy all that stuff.

I’m not excusing Madame Blueberry, and I like Bob the Tomato as well as any other Oklahoman. And I am not really intending to disparage Veggie Tales. After all, it’s a thirty-minute cartoon intended for kids. The complexities of our globalized economy can hardly be dealt with in a thirty-minute cartoon.

But, we adult Oklahomans sometimes tend to look at complex situations armed with the intellect, moral judgment, and discernment of an 8-year-old Bible schooler. That is, we apply a Veggie Tales mentality to situations that are beyond the complexity of Bob the Tomato and Larry the Cucumber. For example, here in Oklahoma, our response to the sub prime mortgage crisis has been outrage. But outrage directed at whom? What I hear and see is disdain for the individual homebuyers who took out loans for a home, and were subsequently unable to keep up their payments. Negative comments about homebuyers who bought “beyond their means” abound. Same for those with staggering credit card debt. It is quite possible that many Madame-Blueberry-wannabes bought houses or consumer goodies that were simply beyond their families’ budgets. What about the loan officer or credit card company making this loan? Clearly those who are paid to loan money and assess the potential for repayment were asleep at the wheel. The lending institutions had the upper hand in a lopsided power relationship. Yet, one hears little criticism of these institutions here in Oklahoma. Like the skinny-green-onion-guys and Stuff Mart executives, they seem to be only sideline characters.

We tend to see many situations as a mistake by a single individual, even when a powerful institution (business or government) clearly had more power than the individual involved. Did Madame Blueberry cause us to see things this way? Of course not. But we tend to interpret economic circumstances as matters of individual action or choice, while failing to notice the influence of large institutions. Maybe we need to reconsider our analysis of Madame Blueberry!

Arden Rea lives in Oklahoma City.